When I was 15, my sister, cousin and I went on a blind date to a high school dance. There, in the small California town of Millville (just outside of Redding), I experienced Fats Domino. He played one riveting song after another, "Blueberry Hill," "Blue Monday," and "When the Saints Go Marching In". It was the summer of 1958. We danced so close to the piano, I could reach out and touch him, but I didn't. I just danced and danced and loved every minute, never realizing that this great musician was a human being instead of some marvelous god of music.

Fats Domino lives in New Orleans. At 79, he played a benefit concert recently here, all those greats from his long career. I wish I could have been there to cheer him on and to say how much I've loved his gravelly voice, his heavy-beat stride piano playing, his songs, and his joyous music. For Fats Domino was skittish about coming on stage. Apparently he suffers greatly from stage fright, but this was a fund-raiser for rebuilding New Orleans, so he went on.

A few weeks ago, our friend the Guv of WWOZ fame took us through the Lower 9th Ward here in New Orleans. Wow! Fat's Domino's house. But you can still see the four-foot high water line mark on his garage. Early reports had him dead, along with 1,000 others. Today, a sign on Fats' fence says "Tipitina's Foundation proudly helping Fats Domino Rebuild his neighborhood." But the Tipitina Foundation does more. It's raised $1.5 million for musical instruments for school bands and has been at the heart of efforts to support the music community here in New Orleans.

Still so much work remains to rebuild this beautiful city. The French Quarter, downtown, the Garden District, the neighborhoods of the privileged: all these are coming back. Yesterday we walked all along the levee, Jackson Square, and had cafe au lait with powdered-sugar-laden beignets at Cafe du Monde with our friends from Oregon. The sun was out, making another memorable day for tourists and residents alike.

But here's a picture I took of the house directly across the street from Fats Domino's house.



We can drive through, we can volunteer, but we don't really know the back story of what happened here during Katrina. But we can see what remains to be done and come to New Orleans to be a part of the rebuilding. John Edwards talked about the need to put in a hand, ending his campaign here by working on housing. Put in a hand.

It's fairly cold this morning, only in the 60s, but we walked to the New Orleans Museum of Art near us in City Park, passing these beautiful old mansions with Spanish iron grillwork on windows and doors. The sidewalks remind me of Katrina, like some gigantic hand tipped the concrete up and down, even in City Park with its open expanses of land. As a temporary visitor to New Orleans, I notice the sidewalks. Many houses have been rehabbed or boarded up. Streets have been patched, though driving requires vigilance to avoid the deeper potholes. But the sidewalks remain a low priority (understandably), so let the walker beware!

We saw the work of George Rodrigue, creator of the Blue Dog, in a grand and inspirational retrospective. This Cajun artist began by painting the bayou, then portraits, then spun out into his very colorful and now famous Blue Dog phase. Currently living in New Orleans, he comments during the exhibit that he was unable to paint for a year after Katrina. I can understand why. The scope of the storm damage, even after two years and a half, still remains in the imprint on a garage door of the flood line, two feet off the ground in our little neighborhood.

Much has been done, but it may be generations before New Orleans fully returns. I'm sure the French Quarter still hops at night. It always does. The heart of the city remains in warm southern hospitality, Mardi Gras beads everywhere, and truly great music. I can report that beignets and cafe au lait at the Cafe du Monde are still incredibly delicious. Street musicians (and an electric violinist) around Jackson Square play their hearts out.

We see demolition and reconstruction going on, in every neighborhood. In some neighborhoods, more is needed. We pass mini-shopping malls, boarded up, not ready to return. I'm feeling a little sad, as I'm not quite strong enough to pull moldy sheetrock out of houses, but I still feel we haven't done enough, that more is needed, and that the people of New Orleans are coming through a tragedy almost beyond comprehension. What's needed here are electricians and plumbers and construction workers.

So I'll remember the Blue Dog, and we'll go volunteer with Friends of the Library book sales here on Weds and Saturday, as the libraries are not quite back, and with limited hours and limited facilities. With something like 100,000 volunteers in town, and the indomitable spirit that has brought so many this far, the healing continues. New Orleans is back.

It's our fourth day in New Orleans. I'm reading 1 Dead in Attic, by Chris Rose, a little 158-page collection of columns and stories he wrote between August through December 2005. Rose, previously an entertainment reporter for the Times-Picayune, talks the reader through his impressions and observations during the five months following Katrina. The book is available online at Amazon. This article, "1 Dead in Attic" (November 15, 2005), comments powerfully on the people who survived Katrina.

Yesterday, we drove through the 9th Ward in the Guv's 1975 Toyota, visited his house in the early stages of rehabbing (2 feet of water throughout meant he had to work down to the bones of his house, removing moldy sheetrock. Strands of Mardi Gras beads hang outside, next to that cryptic and undecipherable code painted on by the police and the National Guard in the first sweep through the neighborhoods in the days following Katrina. He's got some of the wiring in, most of the new sheetrock put up and plastered, and a plan: Build a fence first to keep the looters out.

Last night we visited WWOZ for the Guv's Monday night show, "The Governor's Mansion," two hours of an eclectic tour de force: Dinah Washington, Irma Thomas, Tom Waits, Etta James, Blood, Sweat and Tears; Fred Astaire, Paul Simon, Sonny and Cher, Judy Roderick, Norah Jones, and ending with the inimitable Doctor John. I sat in the tiny control room, watching the Gov spin his CDs, surrounded by bookshelves of at least 5,000 more CDs, a little window looking out over the French Market, rain, frequent lightning, and severe storm warnings punctuating the sound of New Orleans, music and more music filling us up and keeping the storms away. Just like other PBS stations, WWOZ, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Station, is holding its pledge drive. Jump over and visit their page. You can listen online. You can make a pledge.

Monday afternoon in New Orleans. The Guv took us on a tour of the 9th Ward, his house and FEMA trailer, Fats Domino's house, and down through the parrishes, St. Bernard, and Lakeshore by Lake Ponchatrain where 15 to 20 feet water surges inundated houses during Katrina. I'm not yet ready to write about what we saw, neighborhoods struggling to come back, one street full of FEMA trailers in front of houses at every stage of rehabilitation, work crews everywhere; other streets devoid of any life, row after row of boarded up houses, some obviously marked for demolition. Yet hope abounds. The newspapers are full of stories about college kids coming down for Spring Break and volunteer work.

We're still settling into our little basement apartment, a sense of home for the next month. Bless Skype for letting me see Rachel and Nick, where all is well with both of them. And I'll close today with a picture of the beautiful, tranquil McClay Gardens that I took near Tallahassee, a true Southern garden, just four days ago. Beth

We skirted along the Gulf coast yesterday, leaving Panama City Beach far behind and stopped for quick sandwiches made on the trunk of our car at a roadside rest just after the bridge into Pensacola. We're starting to see storm damage from Katrina and Wilma everywhere. We whizzed through Alabama, all 60 miles of its toe close to the Gulf of Mexico.

Now we're seeing trees everywhere, their trunks just snapped off about 2/3rd's up, and as we drove south of Biloxi, the effects of Katrina's storm surge are apparent everywhere. Concrete pads for houses stand empty. People are friendly, gas prices are lower than I've seen elsewhere ($3.05 a gallon), and there's a sense of energy. But I'm seeing storm-damaged housing everywhere right next to rebuilding efforts, roofs ripped off, top floors rebuilt and being lived in, lower floors empty, windows gaping or boarded up. "For Sale" signs pepper high-end beach frontage, and road crews vie with resort building crews wielding massive cranes along this barely restored Highway 90.

Finally, we came to a small resort hotel, just west of Biloxi, Mississippi. Armed with our discount coupon book, we settled into the night and then made our first room change (broken micro-fridge, leaky faucet). Our second room change came when a rock shattered the window of our room at 11 pm. Here, the staff works as hard on rehabbing as on hospitality, with a full-time crew still repairing storm damage, two years after Katrina.

We're more than a half-mile from the ocean, yet damage from flooding can be seen everywhere. The Veterans Hospital near Gulfport, once a large complex of buildings (1930s architecture) overlooking the sea, is completely boarded up. We knew that the entire region, that is the northern coast of the Gulf (Florida, Mississippi, and Alabama), was hard hit, but we did not anticipate beaches swept clean of housing and rebuilding efforts so extensive. Now, we don't know what to expect in New Orleans, but tomorrow night begins our month-long stay there.

The New York Times highlights a useful study of mental health effects for those who lived through Katrina. I'm wondering how a city and a region can be rebuilt and if our government (state and federal) has failed in meeting the people's needs. The headlines have moved on, but the people who survived Katrina are still struggling to rebuild their communities. The extent of the damage makes normalcy seem a luxury.

Friends who recently visited New Orleans and worked with Ginger on the Project Resurrection--Furniture Bank report even greater needs and that homelessness is increasing right now as FEMA trailers are being re-possessed. Nearly 12,000 people are living on the streets and under bridges in New Orleans (source: Miami Herald Feb 2008). Where does any one begin to work on this massive recovery effort?

We're moving north now, into the Florida panhandle, into cooler weather, away from high humidity and 88 degree days. But many impressions of Florida will remain unforgettable. The last several days we camped at Midway and awoke to hear a deep huff, huff, huff in the night and an answering huff, huff as alligators called to each other in a nearby channel. It's early in the mating season and the males are staking their territory out. I was relieved to learn that alligators eat only once a week.

We also took the Shark Valley tram down a 15 mile road, accompanied by a ranger-lecture, followed by a two hour drive through the nearby Loop Road. Here we could stop at any point to see alligators resting from the hot sun in murky Everglades waters, and occasional Great Blue Herons standing so still, as if they would be invisible if they didn't move. We learned that the Great Egrets, to us so easy to spot for their brilliant white color, appear as clouds to their prey, the little fishes. My favorite image is this one of the Great White Egret moving slowly into the darkening everglade, as if in a dream.

When we camped at the very southern most point of the Florida peninsula at Flamingo, facing the Florida Bay, we discovered a boat made of hardwood, most likely used by Cuban refugees who still take incredible risks to enter the US. Apparently the Immigration Service still follows "dry feet/wet feet" policies, returning illegal immigrants from Cuba only if they are intercepted in the water, and allowing them to stay if they have safely reached land.

I found an article summarizing Cuban immigration, including statistics from the 2000 Census. Most articles put the total Cuban immigration at 740,000 people from the 1960s to today, with an increase again in the 1990s.

With Castro stepping down, newspapers all over the country are full of articles calling for a closer rapprochment with Cuba, a lifting of the trade embargo and travel restructions, and a resumption of diplomatic relations, as we do with other socialist and Communistic countries. In the last Democratic debate, both Clinto and Obama favored such a move in stages; Michael Moore's must-see documentary Sicko highlights a visit to Cuba and the Cuban medical system, showing us what we cannot see for ourselves.

As we get closer to New Orleans, I'm thinking about the effects of Katrina and wondering what we will discover there. Katrina made an impact on Florida as well. We saw this at the Miami Metro Zoo where the Bengal and Siberian tiger exhibit was dedicated to a 12-year old girl who lost her life during Katrina. Katrina took the lives of 11 people here in Florida, and damages amounted to between 1-2 billion (source Accuweather). We saw this along the coast near Flamingo where park services have been cut back, water-damaged buildings left boarded up and unused, and debate continues now over how to restore this beautiful parkland, especially given the reality of continued hurricanes and the effects of global warming (see this USA Today article for some wonderful photos and the background on a 35-year restoration plan).

Sorry for the long post. Blame it on having access to internet. I still feel a sense of hope that effort and persistance can bring a better world. Make it a good week! Beth